


Keep The Earth Below My Feet

by plume_bob



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Angst, Claudia Stilinski Memories, Family Secrets, Humor, M/M, Magical Claudia Stilinski, Non-Penetrative Sex, Post-Nogitsune, Talia Hale Memories, Tattoos, and the actual inking of tattoos, brief mentions of trauma, post-season 3b
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-22
Updated: 2014-07-22
Packaged: 2018-02-09 23:37:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,264
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2002407
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/plume_bob/pseuds/plume_bob
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There's history to be found in the box of his mom's old memories, but history is problematic when Stiles thinks Derek might be the only one who knows the story. And, as usual, relying on Derek is an exercise in emotional juggling that Stiles is just not equipped to handle.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Keep The Earth Below My Feet

**Author's Note:**

  * For [LiliTots](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LiliTots/gifts).



> A birthday gift to my Jelly Tot, the firefly to my plume. I love you, baby, and I loved writing this fic for you. I hope you enjoy it :)
> 
> Fic set a few months after the Nogitsune and disregards season 4. The design of Stiles' tattoo is far less symbolic to canon Stiles than it is to my friend, so since this fic if her gift and I wanted her gift to be personal, I ask you to overlook that! Officially un-betad but with massive thanks to my amazing Sammy, who vetted this until it was fit for consumption.

 

 

_just give me time_   
_you know your desires and mine_   
_so wrap my flesh in ivy and in twine_   
_for I must be well_

\- Below My Feet - Mumford & Sons

 

 

They never do this; it's one of those rare things like Stiles' own human version of the lunar eclipse.

In fact, it's been over three years since Stiles has even _looked at_ the box, let alone opened it and stuck his hands inside.

First thing he notices is: everything is dry. Really dry. He touches his fingers to one corner of a photograph and rubs the edge, little whispery shivers working their way under his fingertips.

“Aunt Pauline,” he says quietly.

“Think she'd want this?” his dad asks, just as quiet like something might break if they talk at a normal volume—respect, Stiles thinks, like you'd talk in a church, and he hates it suddenly.

Stiles studies the picture and snorts, as obnoxious as he can to break the spell. “Nah. She looks like a horse in this one.”

The sheriff scoffs a laugh and covers it with his fist.

Stiles pulls out the photo stack and sets it to one side on the kitchen table. Underneath is the journal his mom kept for years, marbled blue-white cover and _Welcoming Words_ scrawled in gold filigree across the middle. She'd written in it right up to her last hospital stay, until she couldn't hold a pen steady anymore.

She used to say stuff like, “I was never much of a writer anyway,” to make light of it but Stiles knew better; nobody had an imagination quite like his mom.

“She left this at Big Bear Lake once,” his dad says fondly. “The whole trip was a disaster from start to finish. It rained four outta five days, we argued about everything from the food to the bed sheets. Neither of us said a word to each other on the drive back home. Got all the way to Fresno before she realized she'd left her journal back in the cabin. I remember she had tears in her eyes and I just. Gave in. Right there behind the wheel, all the fights, all the crap, all of it forgotten. Two miles the way back and I realized she was smirking.” He looks up at Stiles and grins. “She'd played me like a damn fiddle.”

Stiles barks a laugh.

“That woman could talk blood out of a stone,” his dad goes on. “No point asking where you got that from, huh?”

“The genes are stubborn.”

“Remember this?”

The sheriff picks up a leather and chord strap, threaded with beads and a tiny silver charm in the shape of a feather. Stiles hasn't seen it in years, he'd forgotten it even existed. The photos are one thing but this clenches a fist around his heart, a sudden splintered lance through his chest.

“I bought her that,” Stiles says stupidly, 'cause yeah, his dad knows that, he was there. He takes it and crushes it in his hand tightly, feels the little feather press into his palm. “She said it used to make her wanna write—“

He's about to go on but something else catches his eye; a dog-eared photograph underneath a pile of seashells and theatre tickets. He sweeps them away and brings it up to his face, squinting like he's far-sighted.

“Stiles, what is it?”

“This is—“ he starts and stops. What it _is,_ is a photograph of his mom. Her and another woman stood in a massive, spring-bright garden like the grounds of some Rhode Island mansion, arms wrapped around each other like they're resolutely _not_ strangers.

“That was, oh, summer of 2000 I think? Your mom went over to Nevada for a wedding. I couldn't go 'cause I was—“

Stiles asks right over him, loud and spitting when he talks, “Do you know who this is!?”

His dad looks at him, wary, and shrugs. “Your mom had a lot of friends.”

Stiles feels kind of light-headed, everything wobbly and weird like he's underwater. He sits there blinking with a handful of photographs and his mom's bracelet still pressed into his fist and the world lurches and threatens to tilt all his crap off his brain shelves.

 _What_.

He shakes his head to clear the paralyzing fog and jumps up, chair screaming across the kitchen floor. “Can I take this? I need to take this.”

“Take it where?”

Stiles leans over the table, one fist against the wood. He holds up the photo so violently his dad jerks back to avoid getting stabbed in the eye with a vicous papercut. “ _This—_ is Talia Hale.”

 

*

 

“That's my mother.”

Derek looks about as baffled as Stiles' dad looked thirty minutes ago while Stiles hopped around the kitchen shrugging on his jacket and trying to locate his shoes. They're even in a similar position, Derek sat on his sofa and Stiles leaning dramatically over the coffee table like maybe someone will acknowledge the gravity of the situation if he behaves like a character in Law and Order.

“Yeah, no shit.”

Stiles had dragged open the rolling loft door and let himself in kind of hysterical and Derek hadn't initially looked surprised—he rarely does anymore, unless some new monstrosity has emerged from the shadows to torment them and even then it really takes _something_ to get that look on Derek's face, the one he's looking at Stiles with right now.

“Okay. So, why the hell do you have a photograph of my mother?” Derek asks, snatching the picture out of Stiles' hand.

“Because that woman she's stood with? That's _my_ mother.”

Derek blinks.

“Yeah. Exactly,” Stiles says like that's something that needed saying, like he's trying to prove some unknowable point. “Our moms, Derek. In that picture. Together. Are you getting this?”

Derek tears his eyes away from the photo to level a two second sarcastic glare because he can always take time out of his day to make Stiles feel like an idiot. “Yes, thank you, Stiles, I get it.” It helps, actually; brings some levity to Stiles' fraying composure.

Stiles sighs and rubs a hand over his mouth, tension draining out of the tight bow of his spin. He swings himself over the coffee table to perch opposite Derek, elbows on his knees.

“Please tell me you're as curious about this as I am?”

“D'you know where it was taken?”

“My dad said Nevada at a wedding. It says Crystal Bay on the back.”

In her handwriting, too: Claudia and Talia, 2000, Crystal Bay.

“Crystal Bay?” Derek chews over the information and frowns. “That wasn't a wedding, that was a haunting.”

It takes Stiles a couple seconds. “I—I'm sorry, that was a what now?”

“A haunting,” Derek repeats but it doesn't inject the word with any more sense than the first time he said it. He bites his lip and speaks slowly like he's pulling the memories up from somewhere. “Laura and my mother had a big argument because Laura wanted to go to Crystal Bay.”

“A haunting?” Stiles repeats, loud and begging for a clarification Derek can't give because the word hauntingis fairly self-explanatory, really, just one of those words that unfortunately lacks ambiguity.

And Derek snaps, “Yes, a haunting, like a ghost, like a ghost haunting,” totally proving Stiles' point. “My mother dealt with things like that sometimes. People trusted her, she earned our family respect and alliances.”

“Okay,” Stiles says very slowly. “Okay. That's. That's awesome and all, _really_ , but umm, your mom was a werewolf. A magical, shapeshifting werewolf who knew about crap like ghosts and—and had red eyes and—“

“Hey.” There's a palm against his knee and Stiles blinks and breathes. It's a thing now, after all the crap, all the nightmares where he wakes up feeling like there's oil under his skin and dirty cotton bandages in his mouth, it's Derek whose steady presence can calm Stiles down in the most efficient way. Isn't exactly what Stiles expected but then why the hell not? Derek never turns him away, never has.

Derek asks, “You done?” in a voice Stiles has come to recognize as veiled concern.

“Sue me for being a little freaked out by this,” he replies dryly. “'Cause that's what this means, right? That my mom knew something about ghosts and shit? Haunted houses? Freakin' werewolves!”

“Yeah, that's what it means.”

Derek who never lies or sugar-coats anything.

Stiles drags his fingers up through his hair. He's shaking a little, brain firing spinning signals like an electrical storm, pulling up memories and frying them like sand into glass. Once his mom had gone to Mexico for a weekend alone, a work thing, his dad had said, but she'd come back red-eyed and exhausted and smelling completely ancient like incense in church. She'd had an old, ornate looking book filled with weird symbols and a scorch mark on the cover in the shape of a spiral. _Fuck._ She'd told Stiles bedtime stories about sea queens and witches and a kid called Jethro who lived in an ice cream truck with his fairy family.

“Am I a fairy child?”

Derek raises an eyebrow. “What?”

“Nothing. Never mind.”

“Stiles?” That concern again, just short of wary like Derek's never sure if Stiles is on the edge of doing something he should be actually concerned about. He could handle it; he did, in fact. Just weeks after the nogitsune and Allison and Derek had pinned a struggling, screaming Stiles to the carpet of Scott's living room, pulling Stiles' fingernails out from his own skin and spreading him like a broken insect so he couldn't hurt himself. Stiles had—had bitten him, hard through the t-shirt stretched over Derek's shoulder, tiny punctures in the cloth in the shape of Stiles' teeth.

“Yeah, I'm fine. It's uh, a lot to take in, that's all.”

Derek watches him in that uncanny, un-blinking way and Stiles shies from the weight of it, just like he always does. Derek with his searching looks all the damn time, like Stiles is a puzzle that irritates him because there's no neat solution. And Stiles has just handed him a stack of huge, misshapen pieces right here; he hopes Derek's fucking irritated.

“Did you know that magic is in the genes?” No. No he didn't know that. He is a person entirely _not_ in the know and it's clearly, glaringly obvious given how Derek quickly goes on to explain himself. “It's like shapeshifting, emissaries, it gets passed on through generations.”

What had he said to his dad earlier? The genes are stubborn.

“I—I'm not—“

“Maybe you are.”

“I made a ring of mountain ash work once— _once!_ That doesn't make me a fucking wizard!”

“Would you calm down? This is good news.”

Stiles gawps at him. “Our definition of good versus bad news is obviously wildly different, Derek, okay?”

“Has anyone died?” Derek asks, dry and actually kind of amused and it's infectious, that look on his face; unfairly disarming. “Has anyone been kidnapped? Attacked? Bitten?”

“No,” Stiles replies and stubbornly looks down at his clasped hands between his knees.

Derek's not letting him off that easy, though. He cocks his head, ducks low into Stiles' eye-line so Stiles can't ignore him and damn him for being so stupidly pretty and reasonable. Damn him for being so wholesomely proud of this stuff, this world he's lived and breathed since his little werewolfy birth.

“I know you wanna ask me stuff,” he needles.

“Oh, you know that, do you?”

Derek smirks. “Come on, it's _you_.”

There's plenty he wants to ask. Was his mom a witch? Are there such things as witches? How the hell did she manage to keep this stuff a secret for so long? What he's not expecting to come out of his mouth is, “How close do they look there to you?”

Seems like Derek's not expecting it either because he jerks back with a frown. Stiles watches him rub his thumb over the dulling photo surface. Talia and Claudia laughing and hugging and looking so damn happy and Stiles trying to fathom what that means for him and Derek right now, if anything at all.

“They look like friends.”

“Yeah, I thought that too.” Stiles huffs an amazed laugh. “Looks like we go way back, huh.”

“Can't get away from you, can I?

“Like you'd want to,” Stiles says quickly, feeling flushed and reckless, and Derek raises an eyebrow and doesn't deny it.

“Also looks like your inclination towards the supernatural runs in the family.”

“I'd call it less of in inclination and more of an involuntary conscription.”

“Involuntary, sure.”

“Hey, I didn't ask for your psychotic uncle to bite my best friend.”

“Nobody asks Peter for anything, doesn't stop him from showing up.”

Stiles chokes on a snort he doesn't prepare for and it hurts his throat, makes his nose feel fuzzy. Derek has that effect on him sometimes, his sense of humor just hitting a certain spot.

“Shut up. I'm trying to be angsty and confused here, you're making it tough.” Derek shakes his head and plays it off with a cool shrug but all Stiles' focus feels shifted from the havoc of his day and onto Derek, some defence mechanism he started building up somewhere around the time a giant lizard ate his mechanic. “I'm serious, I'm usually the witty comic relief. I'm not comfortable with this role switching.”

“Just trying to pre-empt you freaking out on me.”

He'd push—he usually does, especially with Derek—but Derek's still thumbing the photograph of his mother. Stiles has a box full of memories at home that's never even seen a fire.

“Whatever,” he says, a revealing tremble in his voice that Derek can probably hear and glean a million different things from; excitement, he thinks vaguely. “Wanna keep the photo? Me and my dad have got plenty.”

Derek's face is too-carefully neutral. “You sure?”

“Yeah, dude, its no big deal.”

“Thanks.”

Stiles tries his damnedest not to smile. “You're welcome.”

“Shut up.”

“I didn't even—“

“Your face did,” Derek says like he's all of five.

“Yeah, well, your face—“ He doesn't really know how to finish that sentence, anything but the staring he's doing; Derek far too close and his eyes way too bright. “Is. Y'know.”

Oh, it's awkward all of a sudden. Derek swallows and looks down at Stiles' hand fisted between his knees and it saves them with a perfect moment of forgetfulness on Stiles' part.

“What's that?”

Stiles' opens his hand, sweat making the leather and cotton strap damp. “Uh, a bracelet.” He doesn't even know how long he's been holding it, he'd had it stuffed into his pocket next to the photograph on the drive over but somehow it's found its way back into his hand. “My mom's.”

Derek reaches out slowly, pressing the little feather between his thumb and finger. “They say feathers represent someone dead who's thinking about you.” Derek's fingertips are warm in his palm. “Feathers hold spirits, so the superstition goes.”

“I bought it for her 'cause I liked it. No superstition, no spirits,” Stiles argues.

“You sure about that?”

“Would you stop asking me that.”

Derek rolls his eyes. “Do you believe in fate?”

Stiles jerks his head up and he's gonna blame his mouth flapping on their proximity, on his head being a scrambled mess. “Are you using a line on me right now?”

“I'm asking you a question. Some people believe that everything happens for a reason. Scott got bit, you ended up in a pack full of werewolves, your mother just happens to have a connection to magic.”

It makes him reel for a good few seconds, a good question, an Earth-shattering one. “I don't know,” he admits. “I didn't used to, still pretty sure I don't. Do you?”

“Honestly?” Derek asks and Stiles nods, eager and shifting close enough to almost breathe Derek's air; he's always been eager for Derek like this: forthright, open like one of his books. “I didn't used to either. But since Scott got bitten? Yeah. Yeah, I do.”

“That Scott, huh. He's a real game-changer,” Stiles says like it means something, like he's nudging, and the corner of Derek's mouth curves up like he gets it, whatever it is.

“He sure is.”

Stiles clears his throat, thinks Derek just offered him something and he's had a lot to process today, he needs iced coffee and a quiet room to work through his maelstrom thoughts. Maybe a Tylenol or five.

 

*

 

“So your little spark might be a full-blown forest fire.”

Lydia's sat cross-legged on his bed, a book thicker than her balancing on her lap. Stiles is pretty sure it's written in ancient Latin, but the other day she was reading _Les Fleurs du Mal_ so it's not that surprising.

“No wonder you're so good at all this supernatural crap, dude,” Scott says from Stiles' computer, clicking through forum posts.

“What are you expecting to find, anyway?” Stiles asks him, still pacing a groove in his carpet. “My mom making a post in some AOL chat room ten years ago?”

“I'm reading ghost stories, actually.”

“I'm not gonna start exorcising ghosts!”

“You don't exorcise ghosts,” Lydia tells him vaguely, attention still buried in the book. “You help them pass on to the other side.”

Stiles throws his hands in a gesture nobody sees. “Whatever. I'm not doing it. Whatever she was, I ain't it.”

“You loved Ghostbusters,” Scott protests.

“I love Superhero movies, do I look like Captain America?”

More like a Winter Soldier, gaps in his identity like a sieve. That half-dug ache of incomplete in his chest that the nogitsune had found fit to try and fill pulling taut at the edges, stretched wide. There's only so much weight to all of his millions of clever words and they sink to coat the bottom like a scum and he'd stuffed the rest with temporary packing: unrequited love, werewolves; things that never really belonged to him. But this isn't how he'd thought to plug up the hole, with more mysteries, more horror stories.

It's not a terrible ache; it wouldn't kill Stiles to leave it alone, if he were the type to leave anything alone.

Lydia asks, “Have you thought about tracking down some of her old friends, whoever owned that house?” because she can read his mind.

“No,” he lies, and gets a wry smile out of her for his trouble.

In reality, he's doing that thing he does, letting his brain take an idea and run a mile with it while his body stands at the starter's block gawping and left behind. He and his dad have had the same address book for as long as Stiles has been on the planet, it wouldn't be too difficult—

“Derek might know some names, I should go take him the address book,” Stiles says vaguely, mind five miles out in front already, and Scott spins slowly in his chair and gives Lydia a look that turns up the corner of her mouth. Stiles' brakes come screaming down and he glares between them. “ _What_?”

Scott shakes his head, eyes too wide. “Nothing.”

“Derek's mom was in the photo, he knows— _stuff_ ,” Stiles says a little too loud, kind of defensive, and he resents it immediately, the second it comes out of his mouth. “That's not—it's perfectly reasonable.”

“Sure. Reasonable.” Lydia nods, one last glance at Scott before she's back in her book. “He can help. It's his history too.”

Stiles throws out his arms. “Exactly! That's what I meant, that was my point, my exact point,” he finishes lamely.

“Whatever your point is, Stiles,” Scott starts slowly, pulling a face that Stiles thinks is supposed to be, in some other universe far, _far_ from their own, comforting. “It's totally cool.”

Stiles does not like the way Scott emphasizes the word _point_.

 

*

 

In the end, he'd held his phone in his hand, staring at Derek's number for a good ten minutes.

Then he'd had an awful vision of Scott and Lydia's all too-knowing faces and ripped the only Nevada address out of the book instead, folded and tucked it neatly into his pocket.

And now he stands, caught sweating between the glaring sun and its worse reflection bouncing off the sidewalk and up into his eyes, blinded from all sides with his sunglasses still in the Jeep, the Jeep parked up a side street. Lake Tahoe's ripples look made of diamonds through the gaps in the pines, the whole thing sparkling like a shifting sheet of foil.

Lakeshore Boulevard, home of the seriously wealthy, and Stiles feeling decidedly out of place next to the Lexuses and Acuras, the long gardens and little white yachts out on the water.

Stiles just can't imagine his mom in a place like this. He'd hoped for some homing sense of comfort, retreading her footsteps. That maybe he'd feel more connected instead of more distant. It hurts in some loose, bored way that doesn't surprise him in the least and he's gotten too cynical lately, cold even here where the sun beats down and the flowers look too vivid to ever fucking die.

He'd left for Nevada at 7AM, text his dad halfway and ignored a dozen missed calls from Scott by lunchtime. Stiles isn't the angsting type, not really. He's not some tortured loner on a one-man journey of self-discovery. He knows he's being over-dramatic as fuck about all of this and Scott will rip him several new ones when he gets back, if he ever stops rolling his eyes.

He makes a fist around the leather-chord strap in his pocket and finally, just _finally,_ slips it onto his wrist like he's wanted to since he picked it up. It feels—something, nice maybe, and he walks the forty yard driveway to a patchwork-stone porch, crowned over by a smooth wood arch.

“Deep breaths, dude, c'mon, you can do—“

“Can I help you?”

He spins, back hitting the large double doors hard, Stiles knocking the air out of himself.

A woman in a wide-rimmed hat and pink summer dress, must be in her 60s or thereabouts, hair pure white and bouncy at her shoulders, stands with her arms wrapped around a grocery bag. She looks remarkably calm to find a gawking stranger on her doorstep.

“Don't call the police,” Stiles blurts and she raises her eyebrows, amused.

“Had you planned on robbing on me?”

“No! God, no.”

“Then come take this bag from me, it's heavy.”

Stiles moves on autopilot at the regal, commanding tone of her voice. He holds the groceries to his chest while she unlocks the door, follows her across a hall so gleaming it might as well be a spaceship interior, and to the kitchen that's just as big, just as gleaming.

“Put them on the counter.”

He does, obediently, and watches her move around the room, removing her hat, placing things on shelves, all with an easy grace while Stiles stands feeling awkward and uncertain, fiddling with the little silver feather on his strap.

“Now.” She pulls up a stool at the breakfast counter, gesturing for Stiles to do the same. “I'm almost certain you didn't come here to carry my grocery bags.”

She has eyes so blue they're almost white, shocking like lightning, and Stiles feels x-rayed, uncomfortably naked.

“Um. I'm—my name is Stilinski, that's. I mean, I don't even know if you're who I'm—“

“Stilinski,” she says slowly, taking a measured breath, and then, “I'm so sorry about your mother.”

Stiles swallows and asks hoarsely, “So you knew her?”

“I knew her. What could you possibly be after all the way out here?“ And there she hesitates. “Unless, you didn't know—” He tenses, hand curling into a fist on the counter. “Not everything,” she amends softly, and he wonders if she's actually psychic or Stiles is just projecting massively.

“Nobody knows everything about their parents, everyone's entitled to their secrets, you can't _know_ every bit of someone—“

He's boiling up a rant and she holds up her hand by way of apology, every finger wrapped in silver rings. “Would you care for a drink?”

It deflates him and he slumps, thinking up things to say and feeling them fizzle out on his tongue. She doesn't wait for an answer before going to the fridge and pulling out a pitcher of something pale yellow with ice. She pours two glasses and sets one in front of him and then stares at him until he takes a sip;it's good, home-made lemonade.

“My name's Gloria.”

He knows as much from the address book, but he doesn't say that. “People call me Stiles.”

She smiles at that, holds up her glass for Stiles to tap with his own. “So,” she starts brightly. “You want the story of how I met your mother or are you looking for something a little more enlightening than that?”

“I don't know what I'm looking for,” he tells her honestly, a wry twist to his mouth. “I don't even know why I'm here. And you, you didn't exactly seem surprised to find me at your door.”

“I don't get many visitors. The ones I do get are usually—special visitors.” Stiles quirks an eyebrow and she gives him a devious look. He finds, suddenly, he likes her. “Specifically, people with certain predilections towards the mystic.”

What he finds, in that moment of acknowledgement, is that he's surprised. Because some part of him had clearly been waiting for this bubble to burst and for Gloria to know precisely fuck all about ghosts or magic. He'd been anxious for—of hopeful for? He doesn't even know—confirmation that this whole ghost thing wasn't all some elaborate joke or just Stiles plain old losing his grip on reality again, scraping in the dark for straws.

“Your mother had a natural capacity for empathy,” Gloria tells him and Stiles nods, he'd known that already. “I mean, yes, she could read people well, but not just people. She had this uncanny magnetism that attracted spirits. Now, back then I didn't know an intelligent haunting from a residual one.” He looks at her blankly and she explains, “I was a lawyer with six cats and a messy divorce on the go. And then one Sunday afternoon my original Robert Rauschenberg painting flew off the wall and tried to make friends with my head.”

Stiles coughs an undignified snort. “Oh, God, I'm sorry.” But she's smiling, waving away his apology.

“It was a shock, I tell you. One minute your world is so narrow and the next—well. You obviously know all about that.”

“You could say that, yeah. So, what? My mom was some kinda Lorraine Warren?”

“Oh, hardly; she was as unnerved as I was,” Gloria says fondly. “No, it was a woman I'd known many years who brought your mother here, an old friend. Turns out she knew quite a lot about flying paintings,” and then she adds in a voice that's dry, a private joke, “among other things,” and Stiles feels surreal sitting in a stranger's house miles from Beacon Hills, knowing the same secret world.

“Talia Hale.”

Gloria nods the shared, universal nod for respect; the acknowledgement of a death. “You knew her too?”

“No, I, uh, I know her son.”

“I often wondered what happened to him, after the fire. He was such a bold little thing, so sure of the world.”

“He's—“ Christ, how does Stiles sum up Derek in a short enough sentence to avoid over-sharing. “Broody. And sarcastic. Still bold, but I wouldn't call it that, I'd call it more like stubborn as all get out.”

“Like his mother, then.”

Stiles is mid-sip of his lemonade and hit with a sudden rush of guilt that makes him nauseous, cracking the glass against the counter. Derek should be here, hearing this; Stiles had no right to take off without at least running it by him first. It sits in his stomach like a ball of lead, acidic toss and turn of bile that makes his throat scratchy.

Christ, he's got a lot of self-reproach going on today.

“So, she was no veteran then?” he asks, veering off Derek with all the subtlety of a man clearly desperate and Gloria gives him another piercing look that feels inappropriate at _best_.

She speaks on though, and Stiles is ridiculously grateful. “Claudia? She was petrified. I think Talia held her hand the whole way through it. And every other time after that, as far as I'm aware.”

The fist around his lungs eases and he takes his first real breath of easy air in days, like his mother being actually afraid of monsters is something he seriously needed to hear. “D'you know any of these other times?”

“I do, as it happens. I joined a sort of network, I had a knack for, um,” she smiles, eyes sly, “getting my hands on certain expensive, rare objects: books, ingredients, that sort of thing.”

Stiles laughs. “A knack, huh.”

“Oh, honey, you don't wanna know.” He's pretty sure he does wanna know, but it can wait. “Your mother wasn't really a part of it, not like some of the others. It wasn't a full-time calling for her, just a—a thing she did when the situation was dire. Talia called what she did opening a channel, between Claudia and the spirit. She could see them when they didn't want to be seen, make an olive branch, coax them into the open. Sometimes they want things they can't express. Sometimes their only aim is to cause pain and chaos. Claudia always knew.”

“Do you think, could that kinda _gift_ ,” Stiles mouth sours around the word, “cause health problems?”

Gloria watches him, wary. “I honestly couldn't tell you that. I wish I could.”

He can't physically make himself reply to that so he drinks his lemonade instead, welcomes the bruising cold of it.

Gloria asks into the silence, “What will you do now?”

“Go home, angst for a few days, pull myself out of it, crack some jokes,” he says glibly. “It's the fairly standard pattern of behavior at this point.”

“Oh, Stiles,” she chastises, like she's known him for years. “You don't think that when life gives you a good shake-up like this, it's time to do things a little differently?”

“I've had enough shake-ups to last me 'till I die, thanks. I know all about doing things differently.”

Gloria folds her arms across the counter-top. “Do you? Because you sound like my ex-husband, a cynical old bastard and he's sixty-eight and you're, what, seventeen? He used to take the boat out every day but he never once put a toe in the water. Where's your youthful, wide-eyed idealism?”

Stiles scoffs. “I'm a born nihilist.”

She smirks. “I don't believe that for one second, Stiles Stilinksi.”

 

*

 

He leans against the cooling metal of the barriers, staring out across the lake where the edge bleeds into the setting sun, watercolor brush-strokes in orange and pink.

And he tries to think about nothing, wipes his brain entirely and fills it with a pretty horizon. Clarity is what he's looking for. Because Gloria was right, he can't go on like this; despondency, a torpor poisoning him from the inside out. It's an ugly thing, this sense of direction-less dejection he carries around. Threatens to poke holes in him until he leaks out, completely empty.

“You're an ass, do you know that?”

He thinks he's fucking hallucinating or something, seriously contemplates that he might've fallen asleep standing up for a few seconds, because he can totally imagine his subconscious calling himself an ass but it's doing it in Derek's voice and Derek's voice is getting closer. He's striding up the beach-side path to Stiles' right, coming at Stiles with a face like a storm.

“Derek, what the— _fuck_?”

Derek stops just short of him, folding his arms and cocking his head and Stiles feels like a man dying of dehydration suddenly fucking _drowning,_ the way Derek fills every sense, every bit of yearning space. Unprepared for the onslaught of complicate crap Stiles feels whenever Derek's around, he's rooted and gawping.

“Scott's been climbing the walls. You're lucky I offered to come find you myself, he was about to break into the station and steal your dad's handcuffs.”

The bite of it cuts through his shock; Stiles reacts with an anger he didn't think he had in him today. “What, have you guys got me electronically tagged now or something? I don't need a chaperone to go for a drive, Derek.”

Derek shakes his head, a sneering curl at the corner of his mouth. “Sure, it's not like you're known for disappearing or anything.”

Wow, that hurt; Derek's blows always land the lowest. “Fuck you,” Stiles laughs, kind of hysterical. “I ask again, what the fuck?”

“I told you—“

“I meant _you_ , what are _you_ doing here?”

“I drew the short straw,” Derek says, dry and cool.

“I didn't ask for a rescue party, what is your problem?”

Derek laughs too, then, sounding almost half as crazy as Stiles feels. “Oh, I have _so_ many problems.” He runs a hand through his hair and looks at the sky for mercy. “And at least half of them are you.”

“What is that supposed to mean?” Stiles asks, honestly baffled, and Derek blinks and goes suddenly skittish, looking out over the lake and sighing like he's trying to blow out his frustration to the horizon. “Christ, Derek, I was feeling pretty peaceful 'till you showed up.”

Derel huffs at that, still not looking at Stiles, still as tense as a drawn bow.

“You wanna explain all of this?” Stiles gestures to encompass all of him. “You think I'd gotten myself possessed again?” he asks, a raw and tentative joke because they're still not comfortably at the point of being able to laugh about it just yet.

Seems to work, Derek slumps against the barrier. “Even you're not that unlucky.”

“Don't tempt fate, dude.”

Some silence and then, “So?”

He doesn't play dumb, although he wants to for some reason. “So, I wanted some answers.”

“And the secrecy?”

Stiles looks down at the path, probably guilt but it's hard to tell when Derek's so difficult to look right at in this light. “I didn't want an audience.”

“If you'd wanted to come alone, nobody would've stopped you.”

He knows that, it's a flimsy excuse, and Stiles tells Derek in a voice that's too insubstantial, “You had a right to be here.”

“Yeah, I did.” Derek looks back out across the water. “You didn’t want me here.” It's not an accusation, it's not anything, a tiny fact that Derek seems detached about.

But Stiles feels himself flush anyway, hot air rising from his chest to his face making it hard to breathe. He knows Derek can feel him tense, hear the vicious, guilty thump of his heart, and there's no way of answering that question, just no way at all.

“The woman, Gloria,” Stiles says instead. “She remembered you.” Derek turns to him, all too eager, terribly young-looking. “Gloria Lipski. She's got, like, laser eyes.”

“Yeah, I remember her. She used to visit us. Don't see why we couldn't have visited her, though. I think I woulda liked it out here.”

Earlier, Stiles had stood at Crystal Bay feeling cold and unwelcome and now, in Derek's shadow, close to the heat of him, he feels lit up, energized. “I bet you surfed, didn't you? Played volleyball at the beach and all that crap.”

“Maybe,” Derek drawls.

“You're such a secret jock. All this tall, dark and mysterious stuff can't hide the true Zac Efron of your soul.” It's an obvious character flaw, how much Stiles loves making Derek laugh. It always knocks something loose in him that's irreparable, so he can't help when he blurts out, “You cheered up quickly.”

“Are you fishing for me to tell you you're funny?” Derek asks slyly, like Stiles is a book he can open at any page and immediately follow.

“No.”

“Good, 'cause you're not.”

“Make you laugh, don't I?”

Derek looks at him warily and says with a haughty kind of honesty that gets under Stiles' skin, “Not so much these days.”

“Dude, I went through some shit, okay?” he says, annoyed and going for blasé and actually hitting it pretty well. “I apologize if I don't feel like doing stand up.”

“Stiles,” Derek groans, voice just one long-suffering sigh. “I don't have any expectations of you. It's just an observation, take it or leave it.”

Stiles squirms under it, feels the little bubbles of discontent irritating his stomach.

_Do things a little differently._

“Wanna swim?”

Derek blinks. “Swim?”

“Well, y'see that big thing over there? S'called a lake.” Stiles starts forward, sneakers crunching in the sand and stones, not looking back, just hoping Derek follows. “People sometimes get in the water and flail about.” Then he goes for gold. “But I get it, last time we were in the water you needed me to hold your sorry ass up—“

Derek's so much easier than he thinks he is, so much more predictable than he knows, shouldering Stiles roughly and knocking his laughing mouth shut with the nudge. He strides out in front, practically swaggering, stripping off his t-shirt and unbuttoning his jeans and Stiles thrills, grins into the fading sun like a total idiot and burns a hole in Derek's back to the water's edge, gets away with staring while he can.

Derek cocks his head over his shoulder, eyebrows raised, and Stiles jogs to catch up because he can't resist that, shoes, jeans, t-shirt in a trail in the sand.

Derek's in before Stiles gets to him, wading out to waist height and going under. The water's still warm at the surface, cooler underneath but it's welcome against his heated skin, the thick coat of tension from the weird few days he's had. It feels fresh, renewing.

When Derek pops back up, raking his wet hair into ridiculous spikes, Stiles asks him, “Think our moms did this?”

“Maybe. My mom loved the water.”

Stiles reaches out, feeling giddy and stupid, and hooks a loose bit of Derek's hair in his finger, pulling it off his forehead and smoothing it back.

Derek's eyes go a little dark and he gives Stiles a quick, calculating look down to where his hips meet the water. It heats up by several degrees, Stiles feeling parboiled and anticipating a further grilling. Derek's muscles shift, slow and rippling like he's part water himself, and Stiles' breath comes quicker, he can hear it loud in his ears, bouncing around the space between them.

He feels a split-second of slick skin against his calf and then his legs are out from under him.

“You—fucker,” he spits around the water in his mouth, making a swipe for Derek and missing. Derek's laugh echoes and fades, he's swimming away. “Do you know how much bacteria this water's probably got in it?” Stiles shouts after him, gets ignored, then grudgingly follows.

It's a kind of bet with himself, how far he can get before he realizes how much he fucking hates huge bodies of water, but this is the goal, the _do things differently_ goal, and if it involves facing down a fear or two in the process, Stiles calls that a win.

Derek must slow, there's no way Stiles could catch him otherwise, and they tread water where it's too deep to fathom, pitch black going down and down.

“Watch Cthulhu decide to make an appearance,” Stiles vaguely comments.

“Not sure Cthulhu could fit in Lake Tahoe.”

“It's a big lake. Deep.”

“Are you scared of deep water?” Derek asks and it's not goading, he actually sounds curious.

“I'm not too good with water in general. Since—y'know. Giant lizard. Which kinda, round-about brings us back to Cthulhu, even though he's more squid than lizard—“

Derek touches him under the surface and the words suck right back up into Stiles' throat, which he's grateful for because there's no end to how long he could talk about this subject and he's in a babbling sort of mood this evening, something unscrewed in him. Derek's fingers wrap around Stiles' wrist and he brings Stiles' hand up to rest against his shoulder.

“Better?”

“You're buoyant,” Stiles says by way of reply and then wants to let go and drown himself because, really, what the fuck. If he had nearly enough shame, he wouldn't be soaking up the feel of slippery skin against his palm or the rough press of his fingers in Derek's muscle. “And by that I mean thanks, yeah, it's better, my human— _werewolf_ —floaty.”

He thinks about Talia holding his mom's hand through Gloria's haunting, through every one that came after that. Fragile and human in the face of boundless horrors and always aware of it, still trucking along regardless, never just throwing up her hands and saying no.

“Your brain's as loud as the rest of you,” Derek says dryly.

“It's rude butting into another dude's thoughts.”

Derek swims back gently, pulling Stiles with him, his hand slipping and curling around the back of Derek's neck to stay anchored. He wants to let momentum drag him into the open frame of Derek's body, wrap around Derek like a clingy squid.

He's so appealing, so very _here_ in the moment, and Stiles wants without being able to put a singular aim on it, and it's dangerous, this sense of his identity being reformed, this putting back together of Stiles' many strange pieces. Derek can't be here for this, but he is, he's holding Stiles up in the water, solid and dependable, and it means that he's stuck in Stiles' structure now, part of the bones of him.

“Our moms were total bros.”

“I can't get my head around it,” Derek admits. “This one's gonna take a while.”

“Me neither. That, all of it, the fact that—“ Stiles chokes, might be on the water lapping at his chin. “She kept it from me.”

“It can be a nasty world,” Derek says without missing a beat, like he'd been expecting Stiles to say it, waiting with a planned response. “Kids worry about ghosts and monsters enough without knowing they're real.”

Stiles shakes his head, feels heavier in the water. “No, I get that, I do, but she didn't want me to be a part of it and look at me, I'm up to my neck. The thing that probably killed her and I'm throwing myself in head first.”

Derek grips his elbow tight, hauling Stiles closer. “You don't know it killed her.”

“She had one foot on the other side all her life, Derek. Your mom called her a channel.” Derek winces. “And you know what she died of.”

“What I am, it killed my mom too, okay? But I can't reject it just because it hurts sometimes.”

“You can't get away from what you are—“

Derek drags them together with a palm against Stiles' back and says with a quiet firmness, “And neither can you.”

Stiles finds his feet under him, heels digging into the soaked, shifting sand. He's unsteady for a second, wobbling like a drunk. “Woah. Sea legs.” And Derek rolls his eyes like he hasn't just given Stiles the world's most intense pep talk.

They wade to the beach, up onto the dry sand, and Stiles half-collapses onto it, bone-deep exhausted for no good reason.

Derek drops to Stiles' left, leaning back on his elbows and tipping his face against the sky, and Stiles keeps wanting to ask, “but what the _hell_ are you doing here?” because Derek never actually answered him the first time.

He stretches out onto his back, cringing at the grit against his damp skin but at least he can watch Derek from this angle, see the water dripping off him to speckle the sand, the shift of the triskele against his back like liquid ink.

His fingers typically itch to know if it's the same texture as the rest of his skin; he doesn't get to admire it up close nearly as much as he wants.

“Your tattoo,” Stiles starts, speaking straight from his stream of unconscious; it seems to fit with the mood of the evening. “What's the story?”

“What story?”

“You tell me. Why'd you get it? And when?”

Derek's jaw tightens. “When do you think.”

“So you just walked into a tattoo parlour one day and decided to ink yourself in revenge?”

“Yeah, I handed the guy a blowtorch and told him to have at it.”

Stiles slaps Derek's bare skin with the back of his hand. “Derek, I'm serious.”

“Why?”

“Just 'cause, that's why.”

“What are you, twelve?” Stiles doesn't answer him, figures he can inject enough expectation into the silence to make Derek uncomfortable enough to talk; it fucking _works,_ too. “It's not about revenge,” he says, exasperated. “It can stand for all sorts of things. In my case it's alpha, beta, omega.”

“I didn't know that.”

“That's because you never listen,” Derek points out, but he's smirking, Stiles can see the corner of his mouth turned up, hear it in his voice; Derek knows Stiles listens to everything, that he can't _not_ listen.

“So you got it to—what? Remind you what you are?”

Derek shrugs. “I guess. I was in a weird place, my entire history was up in flames. I guess I wanted to put my stamp on it.”

“Your identity,” Stiles breathes, and Derek turns his head against his shoulder, soft look on his features.

“Yeah.”

Stiles holds the eye contact even though it physically hurts him, makes his skin slough off until he's all nerves. It's too hot and Stiles' head spins in it, all of it; weary down to his marrow but shaking with a weird, impalpable energy.

“Before, when you said that I didn't want you here,” Stiles finds himself saying, Derek's body going tight and that feels like a satisfaction, somehow; telling him something. “It's not like that.”

Derek waits expectantly, can clearly hear the wild, startled-rabbit thump of Stiles' heart and maybe it's mercy, the patience he's offering. When Stiles doesn't speak he prompts, says, “Okay,” very slowly.

“You just.” He can'tbreathe too well; his ribs ache with the effort. “I don't know, I don't even know, I don't know why I started this line of conversation.”

“You don't have to explain yourself.”

Definitely mercy then, and isn't that a kick in the nuts.

“No, no, I _do_ have to explain myself, I just _can't_ , there's a difference.”

Derek rolls his eyes heavenwards, probably praying for deliverance or something, and Stiles sits up, feels vulnerable enough already without being on his back. He bends his knees and lays his forearms across them, hands clasped together.

“You had that firefly in you for like, what, a day? That thing was in me for weeks. It didn't pick you, or Scott, or—or Allison.” His voice still breaks on her name. “It picked me. There's something missing in me, Derek.” Derek takes a breath but Stiles talks before he can try. “And before you say we all got our issues, et cetera, mine are apparently broadcasting to supernatural entities, so, y'know, I win.”

“You opened a door, the nogitsune got in, it's that simple.”

“I wasn't the only one that opened that door, I was just the only one who couldn't close it.”

Derek doesn't have any sort of answer for that, just a down-twist of his mouth, and Stiles fights the urge to be annoyed; just because Derek's got answers some of the time doesn't mean Stiles gets to expect perfect enlightenment. It's a real temptation, to anchor onto something more solid than himself. But Derek hasn't got it all together, none of them have, and Stiles doesn't know what actual tangible occurrence happened to give him this sense of Derek equalling security from, it's just a thing that he feels, a hundred little occurrences.

“You make things fuzzy,” he says eventually, coming out of him on a breath and sounding all kinds of desperate.

Derek goes so still, Stiles has to check if he's still breathing. “Fuzzy.”

“Sometimes.”

“Right.”

It's not really a reply, but Stiles takes it as one. He hears Gloria's words, shake it up, try something different, and thinks about anchors while the last sliver of sun disappears completely. It's cool and they're still damp and Derek's like silver marble beside him, thoughtful and steady.

“How good are you at tattoos?”

 

*

 

He holds Lydia's sketch in the fist he _had_ planned on knocking on Derek's door with.

Except Derek opens it before he gets the chance.

He gives Stiles a raised eyebrow, eyeing up his hovering hand. “Are you ill?”

“Huh?”

He backs up into the loft. “You never knock.”

Stiles shrugs, trying to play it off; honestly, he doesn't know why he'd been about to knock but now he's made to think about it, it might've been an attempt to force some formality to the situation.

“You wanna drink or something or you wanna just get to it?” Derek asks.

The tension brittling Stiles' spine demands, “Just get to it.”

Derek folds his arms, gives Stiles a quick glance up and down. Stiles was expecting, well, he doesn't know what. Nerves? Awkwardness? Derek's wearing none of that so clearly Stiles is just projecting.

And of course, Derek can hear the minutiae of Stiles' body so clearly he might as well be inhabiting it.

“You don't have to be nervous,” he says, blunt and a little condescending. “You've had worse pain than this.”

Derek snatches a wool blanket off the sofa, trailing it across the floor and over to the windows. He grips the corners and shakes it out flat, spreading it over the floorboards, and Stiles' tongue goes dry; the pain, the pain is _not_ what he's scared of.

Derek, looking up at Stiles from his knees and saying, “C'mere.” Now that— _that_ is wholly terrifying.

“What are you—“

And then Derek does look unsure, clearing his throat and touching his jaw. “I need you in the best light.”

 _I need you—_ that's where Stiles' brain decides to shut off, but he does hear the rest and that's just sound logic right there; in a far off way he gets it and that moves him across the floor, dragging his feet but moving.

It's too hot under the late-day sun and how it streams lines of dusty white-orange-pink Hell down into the room like a fucking greenhouse.

Derek leaves Stiles to arrange himself, disappearing upstairs for what Stiles hopes is some kind of certified equipment and zero blowtorches but he'll take what he can get at this point, he feels that determined. He's all cleaved down the middle but the edges feel straight instead of jagged, smooth like he could slot them back together with the right glue. He and his mom existed on two completely separate timelines, same shit, wrong decade, but Stiles can bring them together, he can trace her into him, just an outline but it's all he's got and it's the most tangible connection he could hope for.

He strips off his shirt, holds it to his body for a while feeling ridiculous and then tosses it to the window ledge. It's better, cooler. He can breathe at least, body already feeling clammy. Flop-sweat, he thinks, and wrinkles his nose.

“I didn't think,” Derek says and Stiles almost trips over himself twisting towards the stairs, Derek watching him carefully, Hitachi-looking case under his arm. “Floor's hard, your back's gonna suffer.”

“I've _slept_ in worst places, dude, seriously.”

Derek lays down the case and fetches cushions from the couch, tosses them in Stiles' general direction before disappearing again.

He has to—he has to _lay_ down now. Lay down, prone while Derek walks about. Derek upright and huge, and while Stiles' instincts never jump from Derek to threat anymore these days, there's the whole other issue of his vulnerability here.

Derek comes back with towels, kitchen paper and a bowl of water and gets to work setting the whole lot out on a low buffet beside the blanket. He crouches and Stiles finally feels like he can sit down, cross-legged, to arrange the cushions. He makes a nest for his head and shoulders, figures the elevation will help the light hit him better.

“That's a lotta wires,” he observes, for lack of anything better to do, little bumpy insects crawling about under his skin the longer he stays still.

Derek plugs the lotta wires into a power supply box and Stiles gets a good look at the gun when Derek carefully threads the needle, brings a metal contraption to the machine and wraps the lot together with rubber bands.

“This seems pretty ghetto, man.”

“You just gonna make useless observations at me?” Derek asks vaguely, negotiating the power supply dial until the gun starts to buzz. “It's a switch, it cuts out the foot pedal.” He holds it up to Stiles face, middle finger pressing the metal down, showing Stiles exactly how it closes the circuit and sets the needle jumping.

“You say that like I even knew you needed a foot pedal,” Stiles deadpans.

“Just lie down.”

Derek settles, kneeling beside him, and Stiles hands him the sketch, the feather from his mom's bracelet blown up to the size of his heart because that's where it's going, right on top of his heart. It curls gently over itself at the top, twisting a little in the middle like he could touch it and it'd be soft and yielding against his fingers.

He lies back and doesn't know where to put his hands.

Derek's looking at the sketch but Stiles blows out a loud breath and then Derek's looking at him instead, eerie intense in the weird burnt light, his eyes looking gold, pupils too big. He's still, _predatory_ , and Stiles swallows, scratches around for hoarse words, “Look doable?”

Fuck, they really, really weren't the right words, but after a heart-stopping second of tension, Derek huffs a laugh, dipping his head and looking suddenly charming as all fuck. Stiles relaxes, every fucking inch of his wound-up muscles unravelling.

“Yeah, looks easy. This won't take too long.”

“Good, I wouldn't wanna throw your back out or anything, hunched over like that.”

Derek raises a haughty eyebrow and doesn't grace him with a reply. He sets out a tiny pot of black ink on the buffet for easy access, drapes a towel over one shoulder and a small pile of paper towels on the blanket. He soaks one sheet in some harsh-smelling antiseptic and hesitates, the worst thing he could've done, with his hand hovering over the muscle of Stiles' chest.

He saves it with a dry swallow that Stiles' cringes through, and the question, “You ready?” and Stiles does his best damn impression of offended irritation instead of knowing, fucking _knowing,_ that it's every inch about Derek _touching_ him, and letting it show all over his fucking obvious face.

“Yes, Derek, I'm ready for you to swab me, _Christ_ —“ But he yelps all the same, Derek attacking the issue with his usual _I will literally show you_ attitude and it's cold, dammit, cold and wet and shocking over his nipple.

Derek tries for perfunctory after that, a level of detachment that screamingly disagrees with the way his throat keep bobbing and his teeth press into his bottom lip. He doesn't speak as he positions the needle, but he looks Stiles in the eye and fucking devastates him all the same.

“Do it, Derek,” he says around the massive lump in his throat and Derek fucking twitches.

Stiles hears the buzz before he feels the sting, and Derek pushes a palm into his ribs that burns and the effect is a terrible twisting _lurch_ in Stiles' gut that makes him moan.

“Easy,” Derek hums, eyes turned down and so, so dark.

He lets Stiles breathe it out for a while, the pain that's not really pain and the pressure of Derek hovering over him like an amplifier to sensation, the floor under his back, the low sun on his face, Derek's shadow everywhere, it's all pitched to a level that's almost unbearable until he takes some steadying gulps of air and adapts to it—adapting, he's good at.

“Okay, okay, keep goin',” he says, fingers dancing into the blanket down by his sides, tapping out grounding rhythm.

The next shots of pain are better, more satisfying, but the press of Derek's palm, his fingertips, the skitter and pull of rough skin over Stiles' chest that's just Derek working him like a canvas, is gratifying in a way that throbs in Stiles' bones.

“So why'd you decide to do this?” Derek asks, distraction probably.

Stiles struggles to get breath to talk without upsetting Derek's rhythm, takes a slow inhale that tastes thick and clotting, air that feels damp. “I'm doing things differently.”

Derek gives him a raised-eyebrow look like Stiles' cool, enigmatic answer isn't either of those things. “Vague.” Stiles sees sweat collecting in the dip under Derek's Adam's apple and looks to the ceiling instead.

“Gloria, the woman from Nevada. She said when life shakes you up, you try to do things differently, and usually when life shakes me up, I turn to beloved sarcasm and miles of colored string,” he explains while Derek smooths ink from his skin with his fingers, a slow drag over and over and Stiles is pretty sure that's unnecessary, it feel unnecessary. “So I'm trying something new.”

“Makes you closer to her.”

The words, they're sentimental, but Derek delivers them with a light, straight-forward ease that makes them simple fact. They don't sound crushing in Derek's mouth, maudlin or melodramatic. It makes it easy for Stiles to say, “We never got to actually share this stuff, so I'm trying to lesson the disconnect,” and he sounds almost detached, an honest logic that's inescapable. Feels good, to acknowledge it that way, because Stiles isn't comfortable with over-sentimentality, and maybe that's why Derek's so perfect here.

And he is. Perfect. Bronze in the light, faintly sheeny along the bridge of his nose, the grooved bow of his top lip. That pool of sweat at his throat. Stiles' eyes are hungry for him and he takes advantage of Derek's concentration, watching Derek while Derek's watching him, as heady as the weightless swoop of missing a step just over and over again.

“Oh, God,” he grits out through his teeth, completely torn from him, and Derek cuts the power and doesn't fucking _move_ , doesn't look up from where he's carving lines, doesn't even breathe.

Eventually, still _not looking_ , he asks, “You need a break?”

“I'm not made of wet paper towels, Derek,” Stiles tells him, harder than he'd imagined it'd come out with him feeling like—well, wet paper towels. Sorta. Wet paper towels laying on an exposed electrical wire. “You're not gonna break me.”

Derek laughs, a strangled thing. “You have no—“ He stops, turns away to dip the needle back in ink.

Stiles hears the echo of what Derek might've said there, faint like a comet trail. You have no _idea_. Or _you have no fucking brain in your head_. Coulda been something like that. He can't process the first one, not even a little bit, because it sounds like a threat and a welcome one at that.

Stiles' fingers spider over his stomach, slipping in a thin layer of sweat, and he shivers at the sensation.

“You're hypersensitive,” Derek says when Stiles really wasn't expecting any more words out of him for a while.

“Always.”

Derek's throat dips. “I gotta—“ Christ, Stiles wishes the guy would just finish a fucking sentence. “Positioning's awkward, I need a better angle.”

“Okay, you want me to move?”

“No, I could.” He gestures, general wave of his hand over Stiles' body. “If you don't mind. I get why you would. Not _you_ , in particular, y'know, anyone.” Derek honestly cringes, something Stiles has never, in his life, seen Derek do at himself before.

Stiles isn't even sure he knows what Derek means, so he shrugs a shoulder, says, “Sure, whatever you gotta do,” and says it remarkably casual, too, considering how much Derek's freaking him out, talking about breaking him, twitchy like this. It all _means_ something, and Stiles isn't an idiot, he's not, he understands what's happening, but there's a difference between understanding and believing.

Except Derek's good at solidifying feverish understanding into concrete fact, and he swings a leg over Stiles' hips, still upright on his knees so there's as much distance between them as Derek can possibly make.

Stiles. He just. Stares. Stares up like he's in worship, some malevolent God about to smite him down and Stiles spreads for him like butter on toast, come and get it, tasty as hell.

He laughs, it bubbles out of him, really, really high-pitched. “It's cool, man,” he babbles, “whatever, whatever you gotta, y'know,” and what he's encouraging here is Derek straddling him, Derek _on_ him. For all the blood pooled in Stiles' chest, rushing to the places Derek keeps touching him, there's plenty to spare for his dick when Derek bends low with his steadying palm in the centre of Stiles' sternum, keeping most of his weight off except for that one hard point of stunning contact.

His heart tries to jump up to meet Derek's own pulse where he's resting his wrist, working ink back under Stiles' skin.

“You said I make things fuzzy,” he says slowly, almost slurred, and Stiles' whole nervous system clenches.

“No. Nono _nono_ no way. This is way too cruel, you can't—you can't pin me down and interrogate me like this, it's—it's torture! You're violating my human rights here—“

Where he got all those words from, he doesn't know, but it's his body's greatest defence mechanism and he'd keep talking, he'd just keep on fucking _talking_ , if Derek didn't stop him with that steadying hand skipping up to his throat, fingers pressing gently against his collarbone, his Adam's apple.

“God, Stiles, just don't, don't act like you do things without a reason,” he—oh God, he begs; it's a plea, desperate and raw. “I know.” Derek wets his lips. “I know what this is doing to you, I know what _I_ do to you, but I thought, there's no emotion behind it, it's just, just you wanting things you think you can't have, but _fuzzy_ , what the hell does that even mean?”

He takes a chance, a wild and reckless one that's all vein-flooding adrenaline and scratchy pleasure where Derek's jeans brush too light to really feel over Stiles' dick. Stiles bends his knees up and arches enough to push them together and Derek falters entirely, sagging forward and both hands falling into the cushions at either side of Stiles' head, tattoo gun still crushed in one.

He bears down and Stiles pushes into it and then Derek swears, “Fuck,” looking down at Stiles like he's horrified and enthralled and Stiles can't guess at what he looks like himself right now, maybe a couple years of caged fucking _want_ broadcasting at full volume.

“Finish it,” Stiles breathes, hands hovering around Derek's biceps but not quite touching, not quite daring.

Derek grits his teeth and draws back, sitting over Stiles' hips, sitting with the satisfying pressure of his weight now and not bothering to hide the fact he's hard too. He slicks his hand through the sweat on Stiles' stomach and presses down, splaying his fingers, truly, honestly filthy and meaning to be. The next buzz of the needle in Stiles' skin is electric, a million little thrilling shocks that push in and scatter like electrical sparks, heating his face with a flush and spreading down, warm in his belly, throbbing in his dick.

Stiles will spit-shine him a fucking medal for how steady Derek's working hand is, how the concentration shutters his face again like he's not shifting his impatient hips to catch friction and Stiles isn't gripping and tying to twist the denim stretched over his thighs.

“Speak, Stiles, tell me, tell me what you're thinking,” he demands and Stiles is like a torrent unleashed, Derek should know never to give him this kinda permission and especially not when he's this fucking high.

“Thinking about when you put that needle down, what you're gonna do, what you're gonna do _to me,_ thinking it might kill me but like, good kill, y'know? Best death ever.”

“What d'you want me to do?”

God, Derek's so _steady-handed_ , it's making Stiles giddy, the feel of his deft and competent fingers. “Something that involves my dick please.”

Derek coughs a laugh and grinds helplessly against him. “Jesus Christ.”

“And you gotta kiss me, you really, really gotta kiss me—“

The needle stops and Stiles groans and Derek's mouth, his _mouth_ , opens up over the sore skin over Stiles' heart, his tongue soft and damp and lapping at ink, lips dragging and sucking kisses, and he's overwhelmed in an entirely new way, Derek mouthing at years of Stiles' own self-abuse like he can make it clean.

He can't, only Stiles can do that, Stiles and the old and new of his mom coming together, blending until he's erased all the visible lines, until he's re-written false history and made it into one cohesive plot.

But it helps—fuck, it helps, grounds him in a way nothing else could, grounds him in a way only messed-up but still-standing Derek can.

His fingers are twisted into Derek's hair and he doesn't know how they got there. He's never touched Derek like this, it's alien, really surreal; untouchable Derek suddenly pliant in his hands, made solid and needy.

“Meant my mouth, dude, but that's, oh, _God,_ that's good too.”

“Last little bit,” Derek murmurs into Stiles' skin, traces of black against his lips that he licks away with his eyes up and burning.

“Fucking hurry up,” Stiles whines, kicking Derek in the back with his knee.

Derek catches his breath—Stiles doesn't remember him actually losing it—and finishes the task, the final shading of the feather, the pain solidifying finally in his bones. Stiles' hand is still on Derek, wrapped around his wrist where he's shockingly delicate.

Derek wipes down the finished tattoo carefully, the whole area throbbing darkly, over-heated to boiling. He leans to the left to pick up a small round mirror and holds it at an angle, showing Stiles his work, what it looks like completely on display—how _Derek's_ seeing it.

His breath catches a little. “Dude.”

“Yeah?”

Derek's eyes are too bright, face a slack smile; proud of himself, it's not a look Stiles sees on him often but it's gorgeous, as gorgeous as the tattoo, the curling black lines and whisping strokes as light as air. He admires it on his flesh, how different it makes him feel, and Derek puts the mirror down, shifting his weight and making Stiles panic.

“Don't,” he snaps, fisting a hand in Derek's t-shirt.

Derek stares down at him, moving carefully with Stiles' hand still in his clothes, purposefully, shifting back on his knees and—and _parting_ Stiles' thighs and settling between them. He palms Stiles' hips, fucking steady, big hands, and then presses the heel of one against the hard line of Stiles' cock through his jeans.

Stiles bucks into it, his legs falling wide open and he feels needy and obscene right now even though the level of naked going on here is appallingly low. He'll rectify it, he will, but Derek's hand fits a perfect shape around his dick, feels rough and gritty and slow-relentless, he doesn't let up, watching and weighing Stiles' in the palm of his hand.

He could come from this, the smothered intensity of it building up and up, Derek's dark eyes suffocating, the heavy rise and fall of his chest too revealing.

“God, Derek, please, please just, just c'mere,” Stiles begs, hauling Derek in by his t-shirt.

It's so hot he could die, Derek dipping low over him to press a kiss to Stiles' jaw, press his nose to Stiles' throat. He scrabbles his fingers in the back of Derek's shirt and pulls on it until Derek breaks away and raises his arms, letting Stiles yank it over his head and off, off and away somewhere and Stiles can _finally_ get his hands over the triskele and yeah, yeah it does feel different from the rest of his skin but only faintly, faint enough that Stiles relishes being close enough to tell.

“Like this, just like this.” Derek punctuates the words with brutal rolls of his hips and then they're just fucking dry-humping right there on the floor until Derek levels an assault on Stiles' mouth, and then it's filthy-wet-hot, the slick of Derek's tongue inside him without any hesitation making everything resolutely _not-dry_ , very, very damp, all sweat and heat and sliding skin.

And Stiles agrees with him emphatically, “Yeah, God, anything,” gripping at Derek's skin without purchase, can't and won't just settle to touch one bit of him because his back is beautifully curved and his sides are smooth and his chest is rough with hair and it's all very lovely.

Derek's weight is the perfect driving force he needs, fucking reeling with friction, immovable floor at his back trapping him between it and Derek's merciless hips and the way Stiles rocks helplessly into him.

He gasps, open-mouthed between Derek's lips, and comes hard, vibrating with the pulse of it, his back arching so tight that Derek slides both arms under him, holding him close and desperate, erratic, the quick jerk of his hips until he buries his face in Stiles' throat and groans.

It's a long, draw-out thing that leaves Stiles wrung like a sponge and sprawled against the blanket, heaving in great breaths, Derek all slumping shoulders over him. He rubs his nose against the fluttering vein in Stiles' throat and huffs a laugh there, a shockingly sweet thing searing into him.

Stiles' chest stings a little, still throbbing. “Think sweat works as a moisturizer?”

Derek peels them apart, rising up to his elbows and looking down with a wince. “Definitely not.”

Tension broken, Stiles goes about ham-handedly rebuilding it again, staring probably misty-eyed into Derek's face and trying not to wax lyrical. His pants feel gross, warm and sticky, but it can't quite squash down the raw twist of gut-deep elation he's suffering from.

“Is this about to get awkward?” Derek asks, so dry that Stiles wants to roll around on the floor laughing.

“Dude, don't even, don't jinx it, I wanna do this, like, all day every day from now on, okay, don't ruin it.”

Derek bites his lip 'cause he's a dirty bastard who doesn't let Stiles see how funny he finds him. “All day, every day?”

“I have literally nothing better to do.”

“School—“

“Negotiable.”

“Socialising.”

“We have the same friends, we'll just do it on front of 'em, they've seen worse shit.”

Derek cracks, laughs, and Stiles grins at him, with fucking come drying in his pants and come drying in Derek's pants and there's disconnect in his head, just like always, but it's so much less daunting, not the empty black-hole void he'd been so terrified of. The ink on his chest feels like a symbol but not just the mark, the physical act of it, purging something, adding something else, pain for joy. There's something settling in him, a sense of calm.

“Is that it, then? You not gonna continue your journey of personal enlightenment?” Derek asks.

Stiles trails his hands over Derek's sides, breathes to shake out his laughter because he wants Derek to know he's serious when he says, “Yeah, I think I am, but uh—“ Derek's skin shivers under his fingertips, warm and responsive. “I think maybe you should come along too, y'know, next time.”

“I came along last time,” Derek scoffs.

“Okay, well this time I'm officially inviting you. There's a lotta mysteries to solve, like, did you know our moms went to Mexico together?”

Derek shakes his head, looking honestly in awe. “Fuck, it's completely—wait, you want us to go to Mexico together?”

“Well, okay, Mexico might be a bit much, we've barely got past the mutual jizzing in our pants stage.”

He palms at Derek's jaw to shove him a little, just because he can and because it really is gross, he needs a shower and a change of clothes, but Derek twists out of the attack, turning his lips against Stiles' wrist in a rough, stubbly kiss that flips Stiles' stomach, still braced over him like he is, warm all along Stiles' front. Then he gets this look in his eyes like he's about to drop a bombshell, and Stiles holds his breath, waiting.

Derek asks, “Do you believe in fate yet?”

And he asks it so fucking sarcastic, so completely sly and with this dumb grin stretching out against the skin of Stiles' wrist, that Stiles shuts his eyes and groans. Shuts his eyes and thinks, yeah, yeah I kinda do, what the ever loving fuck have you done to me.

Instead, Stiles says, “You _were_ using a line on me the other day!” and Derek laughs, smug like he heard Stiles' thoughts anyway.

 

 

 

 


End file.
